Ross Macdonald Long Fiction Analysis - Essay

Ross Macdonald Long Fiction Analysis

Ross Macdonald’s twenty-four novels fall fairly neatly into three groups: Those in which Lew Archer does not appear form a distinct group, and the Archer series itself may be separated into two periods. His first four books, The Dark Tunnel, Trouble Follows Me, Blue City, and The Three Roads, together with two later works, Meet Me at the Morgue and The Ferguson Affair, do not feature Lew Archer. These six novels, especially the first three, are typical treatments of wartime espionage or political corruption and are primarily of interest to the extent that they prefigure the concerns of later works: The Three Roads, for example, contains Macdonald’s first explicit...